So Say We All … A Protest To Dr. Sproul 2.0’s Comments

All of us face the temptation of embracing the spirit of the age. When we look back over the history of the church we should not be surprised that her errors often reflect the errors of the surrounding culture. For two hundred years the church struggled with various forms of racism, not coincidentally at the same time that Darwinism spread the same racism in the broader culture….

“One valuable way to check for how the culture may be influencing the church is to have a basic grasp of church history. If we only go back 200 years, we may find racism normal and acceptable. If, however, the church has spoken with one voice on an issue for most of its history, but finds itself in our day changing that voice, chances are the church has only recently fallen into error.”

R. C. Sproul 2.0

This post is to reveal that,

1.) The Church’s position on race long predates the past 200 years and so was well established long before Darwin ever came along. One would think that Shakespeare’s plays, by themselves, wherein the issues of race are examined (at least 8), would alone have proved the inaccuracy of Dr. Sproul’s statement. Shakespeare well predated Darwin and yet believed in race.

2.) Those ecclesiastical Fathers who have spoken on race over the last 200 years were merely echoing what other Fathers had said that lived long before 200 years ago. Dr. Sproul is just in error when he implies that the Church capitulated to the cultural zeitgeist when his Christian forebears in the last 200 years compromised to Darwin on the issue of race.

3.) The Church, when it has spoken, has spoken with nearly unanimous voice on the subject of race and ethnicity — and that for far longer than 200 years. There isn’t a great deal of quotes on the issue from Church History simply because it was never an issue that was on anyone’s horizon since the cosmopolitanism that exists in our current modernity didn’t exist in the ancient or Medieval world in the way that it does today.

So, with that in mind, allow me to martial some quotes that suggest that Dr. Sproul needs to research this issue more closely and allows us to hint that the zeitgeist change on this issue has been among Dr. Sproul and his like-minded colleagues.

Now to the quotes from the ancients revealing that Dr. Sproul is inaccurate in his assertions. All of the quotes, at the very least, point to the Church’s historic position that people groups are not all the same and that conversion does not wipe out our ethnic identities.

“We are indeed said to be the “third race” of men. What, a dog-faced race? Or broadly shadow-footed? Or some subterranean Antipodes? If you attach any meaning to these names, pray tell us what are the first and the second race, that so we may know something of this “third.” . . . Granted, then, that the Phrygians were the earliest race, it does not follow that the Christians are the third. For how many other nations come regularly after the Phrygians? Take care, however, lest those whom you call the third race should obtain the first rank, since there is no nation indeed which is not Christian. Whatever nation, therefore, was the first, is nevertheless Christian now. It is ridiculous folly which makes you say we are the latest race, and then specifically call us the third. But it is in respect of our religion, not of our nation, that we are supposed to be the third; the series being the Romans, the Jews, and the Christians after them.”

Tertullian (A.D. 160 – 225)
Ad Nationes, Book 1, Chapter 8

Tertullian sees race and nationhood as something physical rather than spiritual, thus he mentions the corporeal appellations like “dog-faced,” and “shadow-footed” to describe different races. Tertullian also clearly connects the concepts of race and nationhood contra the alienist idea of propositional nationhood. . . . To insist that the Christian is a race, Tertullian seems to be telling us, is to slip into Gnostic categories. Christians are not a race but a religion and when races convert to Christianity, as they all will someday do, this will not negate the races or nations they already belong to. It will simply cause those races and nations to glorify God as one body with many parts glorifies God.

“If it is a source of joy and glory to men to have children like unto themselves – and it is more agreeable to have begotten an offspring then when the remaining progeny responds to the parent with like lineaments – how much greater is the gladness of God the Father, when any one is so spiritually born that in his acts and praises the divine eminence of race [genus] is announced!”

Cyprian (A.D. 200 – 258)
The Treatises of Cyprian, p 1012

Adi Schlebush adds interesting insight in order to help us understand what Cyprian is saying here,

As alienists are prone to misconstrue kinism to be some self-evidently false hatred of others for having the wrong skin color, this quotation merits a fuller explanation. When Cyprian here argues that men glory in having physically and behaviorally similar children – that such is more “agreeable” – he is not simply stating a matter of near-universal human preference, as if the joy which we take in our offspring’s similitude was as subjective as a preferred flavor of ice cream. Instead, Cyprian’s argument presupposes that it is proper and fitting for men to take such joy, and hence that it is improper and unfitting for men to neglect the value of lineal similitude or, worse, to positively value dissimilitude. This joy in similitude is proper and fitting in the same way that God properly takes joy in His children’s Spirit-led love, free of jealousy and envy. The entire force of this statement depends on the fact that we ought to value children who are similar to us, not merely behaviorally but also physically.

“Do you also say, “See, here is water, what does hinder me to be baptized?” Seize the opportunity; rejoice greatly in the blessing; and having spoken be baptized; and having been baptized be saved; and though you be an Ethiopian body, be made white in soul.”

Gregory of Nazianzus (A.D. c. 329 – 389)
Oration 40, paragraph XXVI

Of course the point is that Gregory of Nazianzus distinguished the difference between peoples. That distinguishing did not mean that the Ethiopian was outside the scope of the finished work of Jesus Christ, but it did mean that the differences between people groups and races was acknowledged as something being real. You will notice that for Gregory of Nazianzus that the very real salvation of the soul didn’t obliterate the physicality of the Ethiopian.

“How then, says Helvidius, do you make out that they were called the Lord’s brethren who were not his brethren? I will show how that is. In Holy Scripture there are four kinds of brethren— by nature, race, kindred, love. . . . As to race, all Jews are called brethren of one another, as in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 15:12: “If your brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold unto you, and serve you six years; then in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you.” And in the same book, Deuteronomy 17:15: “You shall in anywise set him king over you, whom the Lord your God shall choose: one from among your brethren shall you set king over you; you may not put a foreigner over you, which is not your brother.” And again, Deuteronomy 22:1: “You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep go astray, and hide yourself from them: you shall surely bring them again unto your brother. And if your brother be not near unto you, or if you know him not, then you shall bring it home to your house, and it shall be with you until your brother seek after it, and you shall restore it to him again.” And the Apostle Paul says, Romans 9:3-4: “I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites.” Moreover they are called brethren by kindred who are of one family, that is πατρία, which corresponds to the Latin paternitas, because from a single root a numerous progeny proceeds. In Genesis Genesis 13:8, 11 we read: “And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray you, between me and you, and between my herdmen and your herdmen; for we are brethren. And again, So Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan, and Lot journeyed east: and they separated each from his brother.” Certainly Lot was not Abraham’s brother, but the son of Abraham’s brother Aram. For Terah begot Abraham and Nahor and Aram: and Aram begot Lot. Again we read, Genesis 12:4: “And Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed out of Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother’s son.” But if you still doubt whether a nephew can be called a son, let me give you an instance. Genesis 14:14: “And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen.” And after describing the night attack and the slaughter, he adds: “And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his brother Lot.” Let this suffice by way of proof of my assertion.

Jerome (A.D. 347 – 420)
Against Helvidius, paragraph 16

It is obvious to see here that Jerome expresses a standard understanding of the relation of Kin that exists among a people groups. Jerome gives us scripture that reveals that the Jews understood themselves as a distinct people. Obviously if the Jews were a distinct people vis-a-vis other peoples, then other peoples exist as distinct peoples vis-a-vis Jewish folks. There is no suggestion that becoming a Christian erases ones ethnic identification per the insistence of Gnostics, Alienists, and assorted Cultural Marxists.

“The ancient fathers… were concerned that the ties of kinship itself should not be loosened as generation succeeded generation, should not diverge too far, so that they finally ceased to be ties at all. And so for them it was a matter of religion to restore the bond of kinship by means of the marriage tie before kinship became too remote—to call kinship back, as it were, as it disappeared into the distance.”

Augustine – (A.D. 354 – 430)
City of God, book XV, Chpt. 16:

Here, Augustine notes that the ancient Father’s respected kinship enough to be concerned it was maintained. If ethnic kinship was a category that disappeared upon conversion why would the ancient Fathers or Augustine be concerned to maintain it? Notice the Bishop of Hippo insists that it is a matter of religion to honor the bond of kinship. This is a far different attitude than what we see today among assorted Alienists, Gnostics, and proto Cultural Marxists.

“Since one cannot help everyone one has to be concerned with those who by reason of place, time, or circumstances, are by some chance more tightly bound to you.”

~ Augustine

Difference of race or condition or sex is indeed taken away by the unity of faith, but it remains imbedded in our mortal interactions, and in the journey of this life the apostles themselves teach that it is to be respected, and they even proposed living in accord with the racial differences between Jews and Greeks as a wholesome rule.

St. Augustine on Galatians 3:28

“Accordingly the first kind of likeness causes love of friendship or well-being. For the very fact that two men are alike, having, as it were, one form, makes them to be, in a manner, one in that form: thus two men are one thing in species of humanity; and two white men are one thing in whiteness. Hence the affections of one tend to the other, as being one with him; and he wishes good to him as to himself. But the second kind of likeness causes love concupiscence, or friendship founded on usefulness or pleasure: because whatever is in potentiality, as such, has the desire for its act; and it takes pleasure in its realization, if it be a sentient and cognitive being.”

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Summa Theologica — pg. 1301

Aquinas here continues the pattern where similitude makes for a more natural bond than dissimilitude. Aquinas even suggests that to deny this is to deny that one is a sentient and cognitive being.

“Now, we see, as in a camp, every troop and band hath his appointed place, so men are placed upon earth, that every people may be content with their bounds, and that among these people every particular person may have his mansion. But though ambition have, oftentimes raged, and many, being incensed with wicked lust, have passed their bounds, yet the lust of men hath never brought to pass, but that God hath governed all events from out of his holy sanctuary. For though men, by raging upon earth, do seem to assault heaven, that they may overthrow God’s providence, yet they are enforced, whether they will or no, rather to establish the same. Therefore, let us know that the world is so turned over through divers tumults, that God doth at length bring all things unto the end which he hath appointed.”

John Calvin
Calvin’s Comm. on Acts 17:26

At the point where Calvin says, “every people,” he has established that different people groups exist and that Christianity does not destroy the reality of people groups. Calvin implies a good deal more than that but at this point all we are seeking to sustain is that the Historic church, reaching behind the past 200 years understood that Christianity didn’t eliminate the idea of race, ethnicity, clan, and kin.

Again from Calvin,

He then promises that he will cause Jacob to increase and multiply, not only into one nation, but into a multitude of nations. When he speaks of “a nation,” he no doubt means that the offspring of Jacob should become sufficiently numerous to acquire the body and the name of one great people. But what follows concerning “nations” may appear absurd; for if we wish it to refer to the nations which, by gratuitous adoption, are inserted into the race of Abraham, the form of expression is improper: but if it be understood of sons by natural descent, then it would be a curse rather than a blessing, that the Church, the safety of which depends on its unity, should be divided into many distinct nations. But to me it appears that the Lord, in these words, comprehended both these benefits; for when, under Joshua, the people was apportioned into tribes, as if the seed of Abraham was propagated into so many distinct nations; yet the body was not thereby divided; it is called an assembly of nations, for this reason, because in connection with that distinction a sacred unity yet flourished. The language also is not improperly extended to the Gentiles, who, having been before dispersed, are collected into one congregation by the bond of faith; and although they were not born of Jacob according to the flesh; yet, because faith was to them the commencement of a new birth, and the covenant of salvation, which is the seed of spiritual birth, flowed from Jacob, all believers are rightly reckoned among his sons, according to the declaration, “I have constituted thee a father of many nations.”

“It came about when he came near to Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, ‘See now, I know that you are a beautiful woman; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, “This is his wife”; and they will kill me, but they will let you live. ‘Please say that you are my sister so that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may live on account of you.'”

John Calvin, the Kinist:

“It may seem that Abram was unjust to the Egyptians, in suspecting evil of them, from whom he had yet received no injury. And, since charity truly is not suspicious; he may appear to deal unfairly, in not only charging them with lust, but also in suspecting them of murder. I answer, that the holy man did, not without reason, fear for himself from that nation, concerning which he had heard many unfavorable reports. And already he had, in other places, experienced so much of the wickedness of men, that he might justly apprehend everything from the profane despisers of God. He does not however pronounce anything absolutely concerning the Egyptians; but, wishing to bring his wife to his own opinion, he gives her timely warning of what might happen. And God, while he commands us to abstain from malicious and sinister judgments, yet allows to be on our guard against unknown persons; and this may take place without any injury to the brethren. Yet I do not deny that this trepidation of Abram exceeded all bounds and that an unreasonable anxiety caused him to involve himself in another fault, as we have already stated. Although Abram had sinned by fearing too much and too soon, yet the event teaches, that he had not feared without cause: for his wife was taken from him and brought to the king.”

“…. delightful to every one is his native soil, and it is also delightful to dwell among one’s own people.”

John Calvin
Calvin’s Commentary – Jeremiah 9:2

“Regarding our eternal salvation, it is true that one must not distinguish between man and woman, or between king and a shepherd, or between a German and a Frenchman. Regarding policy, however, we have what St. Paul declares here; for our, Lord Jesus Christ did not come to mix up nature, or to abolish what belongs to the preservation of decency and peace among us….Regarding the kingdom of God (which is spiritual) there is no distinction or difference between man and woman, servant and master, poor and rich, great and small. Nevertheless, there does have to be some order among us, and Jesus Christ did not mean to eliminate it, as some flighty and scatterbrained dreamers [believe].”

John Calvin (Sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:2-3)

“Deut. 17:15 demands that for the purposes of governance God’s people are to ‘choose one from amongst their brethren’ only and…the fifth commandment layeth obedience to the king on us no less than to our parents… (Q.III, p.4)

…[E]very foal to its dam… [T]he primary law of nations is indeed the law of nature, as appropriated to man…for it is better that my father govern over me than a stranger govern me, and, therefore, the Lord forbade his people to set a stranger over themselves to be their king. The Prelate contendeth for the contrary…but a man’s father was born only by nature subject to his own father, therefore…there is no government natural, but fatherly and marital… (Q.XIII, pp.51-52)

God hath made them heads of the tribes and princes of the people…it is well said that he the king is a son to them, and they, his maker… What the king doth as king, he doeth it for the happiness of his people. The king is a relative.”

Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex:
Q.XXV, pp.120-124

My only purpose with this article was to reveal that Dr. Sproul 2.0 is in error when he suggests that the men of the last 200 years — men like Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Robert Lewis Dabney, Charles Hodge, G. K. Chesterton, J. Gresham Machen, Clarence MacCartney, Geerhardus Vos, Rousas John Rushdoony, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Martin J. Wyngaarden and a host of others — were not afflicted with the sin of Darwinism. The position of the men of the last 200 years was consonant with the position of the Church prior to the last 200 years.

I understand that we’d like to continue to bury our heads in the sand so we can ourselves embrace the cultural Marxism spirit of the age so as to be able to fit in better with what the Politically correct tell us when it comes to believing that all men are exactly the same. However, the Church from the 1st century forward has a unified voice on recognizing the existence of ethnic distinctions — a recognition that isn’t eclipsed by being wooed by He who gathers men from every diverse tribe, tongue, and nation to be part of His one Spiritual people.

_______________________
Addendum

But his (St. Paul) assurance as a Christian did not supersede his patriotism as a Jew; for in the very passage which follows that glorious expression of his assurance, we find that although triumphing as a believer in Jesus, he had a heaviness and sorrow in his heart on account of his own dear nation. He saw that the church of God — although it would truly inviolably be preserved to the end, by its great Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, the Living and Triune Jehovah — was yet about to emigrate, and no longer to prove conservative of his nation; and he had so much nationalism in his religion that while he repeats his triumph as a Christian, he weeps as a Jew. Nay, higher still. The Lord Jesus knew full well, that the Church of God was safe, that the gates of hell could not prevail against His Church; and His bosom glowed with the most unlimited philosophy: yet while He rejoiced in spirit, because the will of His Father was about to be accomplished, He forgot not that the tears of his patriotism dropped over the tomb of Jerusalem.

Therefore it is, that we cannot allow our spirituality as Christians entirely to supersede our patriotism as Britons. Therefore it is, that we plead for Nationalism in our religion.

And we would rescue from the religion of mere poetry, and consecrate to a higher cause, the rapturous language of our Scottish Bard —

“Breathes there a man with soul so dead
that never to himself hath said
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart has not within him burn’d
As home his footsteps turn’d
From wandering on some foreign strand

The inspired prophets were patriots, were, therefore, national protesters against idolatry and every evil work. Therefore they were Reformers. They were Reformers and patriots. Our own Reformers were patriots as well as Christians; and therefore they decided not only matters connected with Christian doctrine, but they decided on matters connected with National rule; not only against heresy in doctrine but also against usurpation in politics.

“We cannot agree in that cosmopolitan view of Christianity which undermines the particularities of our National Establishment, any more than we could agree in such a cosmopolitan view of philanthropy as would extinguish domestic affections, in all their vivid and constraining peculiarity of influence.”

“Love imagines that it can overleap the barriers of race and blood and religion, and in the enthusiasm and ecstasy of choice these obstacles appear insignificant. But the facts of experience are against such an idea. Mixed marriages are rarely happy. Observation and experiences demonstrate that the marriage of a Gentile and Jew, a Protestant and a Catholic, an American and a Foreigner has less chance of a happy result than a marriage where the man and woman are of the same race and religion….”

Dr. Clarence MacCartney – Presbyterian Minister

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Bible requires us, and the Bible itself pays a great deal of attention to heredity and to genealogy. You have long genealogical tables because family is important. You have strict instructions given to parents, you have the prohibition for example of marriages with unbelievers, so first you have the prohibition of marriage with those who are not of the faith. Second, you have in the Mosaic law the prohibition of marriages with people who may be of the faith but represent and inferior background. There is to be in other words no integration with them even in worship. So that in the Mosaic Law some peoples were not to be included in any common congregation until the 3rd generation, in other cases the 10th generation. The 10th generation would be several centuries. Why? Because these people coming from a much lower, much inferior background genealogically, hereditary wise, it would take centuries of faith and of the standards of faith to produce genetically the same character and caliber and superior strength. So that, some people had to be kept out of the congregation till the 3rd generation, others till the 10th.
So the Bible is not at all equalitarian.

[Audience Member] …?…

[Rushdoony] It’s very definitely in the Bible, however we cannot go the extreme that some people do, such as British Israelites, and some racists, in which they claim the essence of this is racial, rather than spiritual. The thing that produces the superiority is definitely spiritual. The Hebrews had a superior strain because they represented generations of faith, and because they had had faith they had frowned on marriage with ungodly men and ungodly women, with people of bad character, bad strains, so they had produced a superior people. But this doesn’t mean that you retain that superiority if you depart from the faith. You go downhill.

RJR speaking against proposed reparations in 1967. He is protesting in this statement and is being sarcastic.
“In other words, white America must pay a heavy tax for some time to come because of ITS INITIATIVE AND SUPERIORITY.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 615

Norman Mailer has pointed out that the modern outsider to God and law find his hero in the Negro, whom he sees as a ‘natural and social adventurer sworn against respectability, conformity, dullness, and emotional timidity.’ The modern ‘white Negro’ is a man who imagines the Negro to be the ideal man, a natural anarchist and nihilist, and therefore a social hero. Moreover, to gain the acceptance of the Negro, irrespective of his Character, is to gain a victory against law and standards in the name of equality.

There is indication already of another ‘civil rights’ offensive as a next step after the Negro: ‘the Homosexual may be partly replacing the Negro as an object of liberal solicitude and the prime test of liberal tolerance. If there is no God and no divinely ordained law, then not only does perversion have equal rights with morality, but actually truer rights, because Christian morality is seen as an imposition on and a dehumanization of man, whereas perversion is an act of liberty and autonomy for this school of thought.

1965, RJR

“In any case, the goal is, whether directly or slowly, total destruction of Christian civilization. Some have called for … a long period of chaos and revolution, of anarchy, RACIAL AMALGAMATION, and the total destruction of civilization.

R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg, 618

“The demand of humanism (and of its child, socialism) is for a universal ethics. In universal ethics we are told that, even as the family gave way to the tribe, and the tribe to the nation, so the nation must give way to a one-world order. All men must treat all other men equally. Partiality to our family, nation, or race, represents a lower morality, we are told, and must be replaced by a ‘higher’ morality of a universal ethics.”

Rousas John Rushdoony
ROOTS OF RECONSTRUCTION — pg. 574

[Rushdoony] Some of the people who are behind these youth movements know deliberately what they are doing and you cannot pray for them.

For example, this is not a pleasant thing to mention, but it will give you an idea of the depravity of some of the leadership. In some of these revolutionary youth movements (and I have this from authoritative sources, law enforcement sources), in Berkeley for example, in order to ensure the loyalty of the young college students, men and women, whom they recruited, they compelled them to perform various acts of sex, normal and abnormal, with someone of another race, of a black race, publically in front of the group, figuring the only way we can ensure their allegiance is to take them and so corrupt them that they will know when we are through with them, they can never re-establish themselves with normal society. So this kind of thing has become mandatory in the inner circles of these leaderships if you really are going to be at the top level of some of these groups—and I’m talking about the thoroughly revolutionary groups

R. J. Rushdoony

“When there are marriages between races, very often it is not the best of either. And this is another factor that commonly militates against the success of such marriages, in that it is the lower levels that tend to unite in most cases.”

– Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

“The only logical conclusion of the present concept of civil rights is communism. It demands ‘full equality.’ And where does equality stop? Economic, political, cultural, racial, personal, and every other kind of equality is demanded….

‘Full equality’ means that no differences can be tolerated with respect to race, color, creed, economics and all things else. THIS MEANS THE PLANNED DESTRUCTION OF THE VERY ELEMENTS OF SOCIETY WHO HAVE MADE OUR CIVILIZATION.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg. 581

Audience Member: — Is there a condoning of miscegenation in the bible or a direction against it or any remark about it?

Rushdoony Answers

Yes, the Bible requires us, and the Bible itself pays a great deal of attention to heredity and to genealogy. You have long genealogical tables because family is important. You have strict instructions given to parents, you have the prohibition for example of marriages with unbelievers, so first you have the prohibition of marriage with those who are not of the faith. Second, you have in the Mosaic law the prohibition of marriages with people who may be of the faith but represent and inferior background. There is to be in other words no integration with them even in worship. So that in the Mosaic Law some peoples were not to be included in any common congregation until the 3rd generation, in other cases the 10th generation. The 10th generation would be several centuries. Why? Because these people coming from a much lower, much inferior background genealogically, hereditary wise, it would take centuries of faith and of the standards of faith to produce genetically the same character and caliber and superior strength. So that, some people had to be kept out of the congregation till the 3rd generation, others till the 10th.
So the Bible is not at all equalitarian.

“These laws forbid the blurring of God-ordained distinctions. The nature and direction of sin is to blur and finally erase all the God-ordained boundaries … God’s laws are case laws. If vegetable seeds are not to be mingled, nor an ass and a horse crossbred, then in the human realm it follows that the confusion of God-ordained boundaries is even more serious.”
(RJR, Comm on Leviticus 19:19, p.230)

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Bible requires us, and the Bible itself pays a great deal of attention to heredity and to genealogy. You have long genealogical tables because family is important. You have strict instructions given to parents, you have the prohibition for example of marriages with unbelievers, so first you have the prohibition of marriage with those who are not of the faith. Second, you have in the Mosaic law the prohibition of marriages with people who may be of the faith but represent and inferior background. There is to be in other words no integration with them even in worship. So that in the Mosaic Law some peoples were not to be included in any common congregation until the 3rd generation, in other cases the 10th generation. The 10th generation would be several centuries. Why? Because these people coming from a much lower, much inferior background genealogically, hereditary wise, it would take centuries of faith and of the standards of faith to produce genetically the same character and caliber and superior strength. So that, some people had to be kept out of the congregation till the 3rd generation, others till the 10th.

[Otto] I don’t really know what the church today sermonizes against. Once we… when we really come to it, all sins seem to have shriveled down to racism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Beyond that there is no sin…
[Rushdoony] Yes. That is very good. That is about the only sin that is left. And that is an odd thing to choose as a sin, because one of the characteristics of people all over the world has been a preference for their own. People prefer their own families. They prefer their own nationality or their own race, which is entirely legitimate as long as they don’t abuse and mistreat others.

I believe that the world has seen more racism in this century than ever before precisely because we are trying to equalize everything and we are trying to obscure the differences and say they don’t exist. And when you do that, you are going to create a situation where there will be a bootlegged and resentful recognition of differences.

[Scott] Well, you drive underground what doesn’t belong underground. The business of justice, the business of treating people fairly, the business of equality before law and meritocracy, so to speak, of making opportunities open to all, the whole idea of a civilized society is based on the idea of mutual respect. But respect is one thing. A denial of reality is something else. If in order to get along or to placate we have to pretend that everyone has the same intellect and intelligence, the same ability then we have downgraded all intelligence and all ability.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is usually a question of let’s you and he be equal. Not you and I.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, by obscuring the fact of differences, what we have done is to create a climate in which any awareness of reality is gone.

[Scott] Well, it is dishonest.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You are not living in a real world if you don’t recognize differences and say he is better than I am. He is of another color. And he or she is not as good as I am in this particular field where I am good.

“We have today what Winick has called the progressive desexualization of people. The goal is increasingly “the bland man,” among both the older and younger generations. Man is increasingly made into a neutral creature; the distinction between male and female is blurred. As a result, and not surprisingly, in 1964 the American Civil Liberties Union defended a man against transvestite charges, challenging the law for the first time in 119 years.

Moreover, “Transvestism on the part of men figures increasingly in plays and movies” Unisexual clothes have become popular in London, and among some Scandinavian teenagers. Increasingly, the world and America become “the country of the bland.”

Simultaneously, the stage has “created a number of men who were programmed for defeat” while at the same time portraying aggressive women. In fact, “Actresses are not only bigger than men at the box ofﬁce; some are actually taller.” Moreover, “Although women characters once represented the goal of a hero’s romantic quest, today we are getting the woman as Brute.”

Behind this chaos lie certain ideas. First, the rebellion against God’s ordained order is very obvious. The very principle of order is denied. Man seeks studiously to rearrange creation in terms of his own creative mandate.

Second, equality as a philosophical and religious faith is at work. All people are equals; woman is equal to man, and man is equal to God. As a result, there must be in principle a war against differences. Not only unisex but uniman is the goal, the bland, neutral person. Henry Miller sees the return to Paradise only through the destruction of history, meaning, law, and morality. There must be a time of total destruction, the “time of the assassins,” and the new world can only come when the old world is forgotten. This means a period of anarchy, racial amalgamation, and universal human hermaphroditism (“the birth of male-and-female in every individual”) and then the new world may appear”

RJR, Institutes.

“The life of man is more than the sum of its parts; a basic part of the whole is the law of God. Man having been created by God, was created by and into God’s law. To consider man apart from that fact is to depersonalize him.

A man can never be considered in abstraction from what he is. To hold that we can discount a man’s race, heritage, intelligence, religion, and moral character, and then somehow deal with the real man is a common liberal fallacy; the result is only an abstract idea of a man, not a living man.

Similarly, no man can be abstracted from the law context of his being. To attempt an approach to any man, woman, or child apart from God’s law context is to attempt to approach a creature of our own making, a nonexistent person.”

RJR, Institutes.

IS EQUALITY POSSIBLE?

“Today a vast amount of money and legislation is dedicated to making equality a reality by law. The only conclusion of such a course of action is bankruptcy, both moral and financial bankruptcy, because the very idea of law is against equality.
Any and every law immediately discriminates and guarantees inequality, because it declares certain acts, and the people who commit those acts, criminal; this is discrimination, and it is inequality. The criminal is by law made unequal to the law-abiding citizenry. But supposing these laws are changed radically: what then? You still have inequality and discrimination, only now you discriminate against the law-abiding and hardworking. Any and every law discriminates; it establishes a difference and an inequality before the law with respect to men in terms of good and evil. The only question for any society is this: whom shall we discriminate against? Shall we discriminate in favor of socialists and communists and against property owners?

Discrimination and inequality cannot be abolished by law: they are the realitites of a moral world. but can discrimination and equality be abolished, as some anarchists hold, by abolishing all civil law? On the contrary, a new inequality will be established: in a lawless world, brute force will discriminate against the weak and defenseless, and force its will upon others.

Equality is a high sounding and impossible dream. A little thinking makes it clear to anyone that it is impossible.

Then why is it promoted? It is an easy way to garner the votes of simpleminded fools and envious men, and those who promote equality are really interested in gaining power. All our equal rights legislation has only hurt the people as a whole and added more powers to a growing monster government.

And the same trend will continue, as long as there are enough fools to believe in equality. And fools are dangerous to society. As Solomon said, “Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly” ( Proverbs 17:12), and “a companion of fools shall be destroyed” (Proverbs 13:20). The only remedy? “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7).

– Rousas J Rushdoony
A Word in Season, V p. 152-153

” [The] Bible makes clear that God does not permit us to despise heredity and background. That God does not permit immediate integration of all peoples. For example, in Deuteronomy 23:2-3 the Amalekites and the Moabites were banned from the congregation to the tenth generation, because of their background and spiritual and moral degeneracy. The Edomites, verses 7-8 of Deuteronomy 23, were barred till the third generation. And yet at the same time the hatred of an Edomite was declared to be a sin in front of God.

Thus these people could not be detested, or despised or hated, but they could not be brought immediately into the congregation, they had to worship separately in some cases to the tenth generation, and others to the third generation. So that they have a background of segregated worship and of character for so many generation before they could be integrated with the Congregation of Israel. And this is a part of Gods law. “

“Because the Bible is a land-based book, and our faith tied to the earth as the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1), the question is not an academic one. For modern man, land has become a commodity and an investment, not essentially a faith inheritance. Our modern outlook thus warps our perspective. For this reason, our federal government thinks nothing of allowing in as immigrants an increasing number of people who are religiously and racially hostile to us. They see no relationship between faith and land. As a result, the United States and the Western world have embarked on a suicidal course. They reject the concept of Christendom and embrace instead the humanistic “family of man,” and thus immigration policies in the U.S. and Europe are based on myths and illusions of a destructive nature. Because neither land nor inheritance is now seen from the perspective of faith, we have problems in these spheres. The modern state sees itself as the primary owner, and hence eminent domain is basic to its life, and it therefore views itself as the primary heir with death taxes. Both a tax on the land and death taxes are anti-Biblical.

A disregard for ties to the land has been one of the most destructive forces of the twentieth century. In Africa, artificial nations were created after World War II without regard for the fact that they encompassed rival warring tribes. Artificial unions such as Yugoslavia were created after World War I, bringing together differing peoples and religious groups. All such efforts have simply created chaos and conflict. The rationalistic planners of our time are Hegelians: for them, the rational is the real, and their rational ideas become a Procrustean bed on which humanity is tortured.”

“God’s laws are case laws. If vegetable seeds are not to be mingled, nor an ass and a horse crossbred, then in the human realm it follows that the confusion of God-ordained boundaries is even more serious. The boundaries set by God shall stand. Those who deny them shall destroy themselves in their denial of the fundamental order of being.”

RJR, Commentary on Leviticus

Revolution, the cults of chaos, take over. Vitality, power, and force are seen as coming from below; profane language seeks to be forceful, and the forceful is that which is below…. there is a religious progression in profanity: it moves from a defiance of God to an invocation of excrement and sex, and then perverted forms of sex. This religious progression is social as well as verbal. The profane society invokes, not God, but the world of the illicit, the obscene, and the perverted. What it invokes in word it also invokes in act. The downward trend of society is a quest for renewed energy, the shock of new force and vitality, and it is a perpetual quest for new profanations. White men will go to a colored prostitute for “a change of luck,” i.e., to renew their vitality and power to prosper for a time. By “going down,” they are recharged in order to “go up.”

RJR, IBL — Vol 1 — pg. 127

Note that RJR here categorizes the sex of white men with “colored prostitutes” to be profane and implies that such sex is a form of sex more perverted than white men going to white prostitutes.

“Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical Law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator.”

R.J. Rushdoony

See also Iron Ink entry

“R. J. Rushdoony Contra The Chalcedon & North / McDurmon Makeover”

When the magazine, Christianity Today, did turn to the question of segregation in 1957, Dr. Carl F. H. Henry wrote that civil rights legislation ending segregation would be morally problematic,

“Forced integration is as contrary to Christian principles as is forced segregation,” he argued. “A voluntary segregation, even of believers, can well be a Christian procedure.”

In the same 1957 issue there was also an article by E. Earle Ellis, a Bible professor at Aurora College, in Illinois, who would later teach theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky (where, according to his obituary, “many students considered it an honor just to sit in his class”). In his article, Ellis argued that racial segregation could actually be a positive good.

Ellis wrote,

“Segregation has the potential to develop into a partnership of mutual respect … Southerners often wonder whether integrationists are as interested in good race relations as in forcing a particular kind of race relations. The unfortunate fact is that ardent Christian integrationists, however conscientious, are one cause of the worsening race relations in the South today. Their moral superiority complex, their caricature of the segregationist as an unchristian bigot and their pious confession of the sins of people in other sections of the country have not been wholly edifying.”

“Wherever the governmental idea holds the mercenary so completely in check and yields to the influence of Christian morality, it may be a wholesome training school for inferior races, as it is in fact with the African negroes, until they are capable to govern themselves.”

Phillip Schaff, Slavery and the Bible, p. 24

“It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the leveling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God’s design.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

From Charles Spurgeon

“Piety must begin at home as well as charity. Conversion should begin with those who are nearest to us in ties of relationship. I stir you up, not to be attempting missionary labors for India, not to be casting eyes of pity across to Africa, not to be occupied so much with tears for popish and heathen lands, as for your own children, your own flesh and blood, your own neighbors, your own acquaintance. Lift up your cry to heaven for them, and then afterwards you shall preach among the nations.”

“Andrew goes to Cappadocia in his after-life, but he begins with his brother (Peter); and you shall labor where you please in years to come, but FIRST of all YOUR OWN HOUSEHOLD, first of all those who are under your own shadow must receive your guardian care. Be wise in this thing; use the ability you have, and use it amongst those who are NEAR AT HAND.”

Charles Spurgeon
WORDS OF COUNSEL FOR CHRISTIAN WORKERS, pp. 5-6

“To be ignorant of the past is to be like a person afflicted with amnesia. A person with amnesia is considered medically ill and is hospitalized. And a civilization cut off from it’s past is in a similar situation. But there are no hospitals large enough nor doctors wise enough to treat a nation that has lost it’s memory.”

– Otto Scott from the lecture
“Great Christian Revolution #2”

Solzhenitsyn observes in his frank way:

“Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed—nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity—too bad for you.”

“Apart from this election of individuals to life, there has been what we may call a national election, or a divine predestination of nations and communities to a knowledge of true religion and to the external privileges of the Gospel. God undoubtedly does choose some nations to receive much greater spiritual and temporal blessings than others. This form of election has been well illustrated in the Jewish nation, in certain European nations and communities, and in America. The contrast is very striking when we compare these with other nations such as China, Japan, India, etc.”

~ Loraine Boettner, “The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination” (1932)
————
“A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these shall he not take: but he shall take a virgin of his own race to wife.” (Lev.21:14)

Which Matthew Poole exposited, “Neither shall he profane his seed by mixing it with forbidden kinds, whereby the children would be disparaged, and rendered unfit for their priestly function.

Do sanctify him, i.e. have separated him from all other sorts of men for my especial and immediate service, and therefore will not have that race corrupted.”

—————

“White conservatives don’t want to take the lead in preserving what remains of this country’s now tenuous White, Anglo-Euro culture. To take on such a responsibility would make them even more vulnerable to the racial bullets and daggers they have been ducking for years.”

~ Elizabeth Wright, Black Conservative Author

“If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies, and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy…. it is barbaric and reactionary to destroy cultural distinctions between one thing and another; because it is like rubbing out all the lines of a fine drawing.”

G. K. Chesterton

“It is exactly because the Serbian feels like a Serbian, and the Montenegrin like a Montenegrin, it is precisely because the Bulgar is proud of Bulgaria and fighting for Bulgaria, that the Serbian can count on the Bulgar and the Montenegrin on the Serbian. Each can count on the other precisely because each knows that the other is acting on a fundamental and ineradicable human motive — patriotism. If they had all felt internationally solid, the Turk would have hammered them like eggshells; and especially if they had also felt proletarian.

And as it is with cooperation and the nation, so it is with cooperation and the family. If nations are to act together, they must admit each other’s nationality. And if we want to play at Happy Families (that delightful game), the first necessity is, despite Divorce Reports, to see that we have families of some kind. If the families are independent, they will cooperate; if they are ‘solid’ they will quarrel. For the chief lesson of the whole of this war is that free things can achieve a unity, but tied things cannot. The small nations came together, where the great empire had always been breaking up.”

G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton Defines and Defends Patriotism
The opening section of G. K. Chesterton’s essay, “The Patriotic Idea”, first published in 1904, and included in G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works, Volume XX: Christendom in Dublin, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, A Short History of England (also available in softcover), which was edited by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.:IThe scepticism of the last two centuries has attacked patriotism as it has attacked all the other theoretic passions of mankind, and in the case of patriotism the attack has been interesting and respectable because it has come from a set of modern writers who are not mere sceptics, but who really have an organic belief in philosophy and politics. Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest of living Europeans, has succeeded in founding a school which, whatever its faults (and they are neither few nor small), has all the characteristics of a great religion. Like a great religion, it is positive, it is public, above all, it is paradoxical. The Tolstoyan enjoys asserting the hardest parts of his belief with that dark and magnificent joy which has been unknown in the world for nearly four hundred years. He enjoys saying, “No man should strike a blow even to defend his country,” in the same way that Tertullian enjoyed saying,“Credo quia impossible.”This important and growing sect, together with many modern intellectuals of various schools, directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind. To them, in not a few instances, every man is the rival of mankind. And they bear a dim and not wholly agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of people who go about saying that nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches.Suppose that two men, lost upon some gray waste in rain and darkness, were to come upon the light of a porch and take shelter in some strange house, where the household entertained them pleasantly. It might be that some feast or entertainment was going forward; that private theatricals were in preparation, or progressive whist in progress. One of these travellers might lend a hand instinctively and heartily, might play his cards at whist in a fighting spirit, might black his face in theatricals and make the children laugh. And this he would do because he felt kindly towards the whole company. But the other man would say: “I love this company so much that I dislike its being divided into factions by progressive whist; I love so much the human face divine that I do not wish to see it obscured with soot or grease-paint; I will not take a partner for the lancers, for that would involve selecting one woman for special privilege, and I love you all alike.” The first man would undoubtedly amuse the whole company more. And would he not love the whole company more?Every one of us has, indeed, been lost in a gray waste of eternity, and strayed to the portal of this earth, over which the lamp is the sun. We find inside the company of humanity engaged in certain ancient festivals and forms, certain competitions and distinctions. And, as in the other case, two kinds of love can be offered to that society. The prig will profess to join in their unity; the good comrade will join in their divisions.If the stray guests see something utterly immoral in the distinctions, something utterly wicked in the ritual, doubtless they must protest; but they should never protest because the distinctions are distinctions, and therefore in one sense exclusive, or because the ritual is ritual, and therefore in one sense irrational. If the stranger in the house has a moral objection, for instance, to playing for money, he ought to decline, though he ought not to enjoy declining. But he must not ask, “Why am I arbitrarily made a partner with So-and-so?” He must not say, “What rational difference is there between spades and diamonds?” If he really loves his kind, he will, as far as he can, and in the great mass of things, play the parts given him. He will preserve this gay and impetuous conservatism; he will throw himself into the competitive sports of nationality; he will walk with relish in the ancient theatricals of religion.

Because the modern intellectuals who disapprove of patriotism do not do this, a strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings. The man who loves his own children is much more universal, is much more fully in the general order, than the man who dandles the infant hippopotamus or puts the young crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving his own children he is doing something which is (if I may use the phrase) far more essentially hippopotamic than dandling hippopotami; he is doing as they do. It is the same with patriotism. A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity. The man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of compliments – imitation.The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.There is, moreover, another broad distinction, which inclines us to side with those who support the abstract idea of patriotism against those who oppose it. There are two methods by which intelligent men may approach the problem of that temperance which is the object of morality in all matters—in wine, in war, in sex, in patriotism; that temperance which desires, if possible, to have wine without drunkenness, war without massacre, love without profligacy, and patriotism without Sir Alfred Harmsworth. One method, advocated by many earnest people from the beginning of history, is what may roughly be called the teetotal method; that is, that it is better, because of their obvious danger, to do without these great and historic passions altogether. The upholders of the other method (of whom I am one) maintain, on the contrary, that the only ultimate and victorious method of getting rid of the danger is thoroughly to understand and experience the passions. We maintain that with every one of the great emotions of life there goes a certain terror, which, when taken with imaginative reality, is the strongest possible opponent of excess; we maintain, that is to say, that the way to be afraid of war is to know something about war; that the way to be afraid of love is to know something about it; that the way to avoid excess in wine is to feel it as a perilous benefit, and that patriotism goes along with these. The other party maintains that the best guarantee of temperance is to wear a blue ribbon; we maintain that the best guarantee is to be born in a wine-growing country. They maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to take a celibate vow; we maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to fall in love. They maintain that the best guarantee of avoiding a reckless pugnacity is to forswear fighting; we maintain that the best guarantee is to have once experienced it. They maintain that we should care for our country too little to resent trifling impertinences; we maintain that we should care too much about our country to do so. It is like the Mohammedan and Christian sentiment of temperance. Mohammedanism makes wine a poison; Christianity makes it a sacrament.

Many humane moderns have a horror of nationality as the mother of wars. So in a sense it is, just as love and religion are. Men will always fight about the things they care for, and in many cases quite rightly. But there is another thing which should not be altogether forgotten, and that is this: that in so far as men increase in intelligence they must see that a quite primary and mystical affection is a foolish thing to put into violent competition with another thing of the same kind. Men may fight about a rational preference, because there victory may prove something. But an irrational preference is far too fine a thing to fight about, because there victory proves nothing.

When men first become conscious of splendid and disturbing emotions, it is their natural instinct, their first and most natural and most reasonable instinct, to kill people. Thus, for instance, the sentiment of romantic love went through the same historical evolution as the sentiment of patriotism. When a medieval knight or troubadour realized that there was an intensity in a pure and monogamous sentiment which was quite beyond anything in merely animal appetites, he immediately took a long spear and rushed round the neighbourhood offering to kill anybody who denied that he had fallen in love with precisely the right person. I do not think that it can be reasonably maintained that romantic love has decayed in the centuries succeeding this; what has happened has been that people have perceived not that love is too insignificant to fight about, but that it is too important to fight about. Men have perceived, that is to say, that in these matters of the affections all combat is ineffective, since no combatant would ever accept its issue. Each of us thinks his own country is the best in the world, just as each of us might think his own mother the best in the world. But when we think this we do not proceed, or in the least desire to proceed, to the bellicose test. We do not set our mothers to fight each other in an ampitheatre, and for the excellent reason that if one mother overcame the other mother, it would not make the least difference to anybody. That is the only serious objection to the institution of the duel. That the duel kills men seems to me a comparatively trifling matter; football and fox-hunting and the London hospitals very frequently do that. The only rational objection to the duel is that it invokes a most painful and sanguinary proceeding in order to settle a question, and does not settle it. It is our belief, therefore, that the right way to avoid the incidental excesses of patriotism is the same as that in the cases of sex or war—it is to know something about it. Just as, according to our view, there will always be in some degree the power of sex and the use of wine, so there will always be the possibility of such a thing as patriotic war. But just as a man who has been in love will find it difficult to write a whole frantic epic about a flirtation, so all that kind of rhetoric about the Union Jack and the Anglo-Saxon blood, which has made amusing the journalism of this country for the last six years, will be merely impossible to the man who has for one moment called up before himself what would be the real sensation of hearing that a foreign army was encamped on Box Hill. The light and loose talk about national victories impresses those who think with me merely as a mark of the lack of serious passion. The average reasonable citizen, of whatever political colour, would admit that such talk shows too much patriotism. We should say that it shows too little.

To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who professes to love humanity and hate local preference, we shall reply: “How can you love humanity and hate anything so human?” If he replies that in his eyes local preference is a positive sin, is only human in the sense that wife-beating is human, we shall reply that in that case he has a code of morality so different from ours that the very use of the word “sin” is almost useless between us. If he says that the thing is not positive sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply that this is a matter of impression, and that to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow to the point of suffocation. And we shall pray for him, hoping that some day he will break out of the little stifling cell of the cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the open fields and infinite sky of England. Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one place rather than another, and that he does not know what is a nation and what is not, we shall say: “By this sign you are conquered; your weakness lies precisely in the fact that you do not know a nation when you see it. There are many kinds of love affairs, there are many kinds of song, but all ordinary people know a love affair or a song when they see it. They know that a concubinage is not necessarily a love affair, that a work in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you do not understand vague words, go and sit among the pedants, and let the work of the world be done by people who do.” It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world.

G. K. Chesterton

“Man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country. The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred, since our kinfolk are those who descent from the same parents.”

~~Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica, Volume 3 (Part II, Second Section)

“Perhaps the most bitter irony of our time lies in the fact that celebrity apologists who purport to defend an incarnational religion have joined the chorus of those who deny the importance of flesh and blood. The bloodless creed such gurus peddle is a cold, ineffectual abstraction, one which the great Christian teachers of yesteryear would find alien. If we are serious about combating the neopagan temptation, we need to remember our ancestors–spiritual as well as biological.”

~~Jerry Salyer
Chronicles Magazine
January of 2015

“As one born in Africa and raised in Africa, I have dedicated most of my life to serving Africans and I have travelled throughout this continent ministering in 30 countries. I was brought up amongst the Matabele in Zimbabwe and have many Zulu, Chichewa, Moru, Nuba and Nigerian friends.I have seen numerous cross-cultural marriages, and generally speaking, all parties involved come to regret it.

For centuries, actually millenniums, interracial marriage was either illegal, strongly discouraged or frowned upon. However in the latter part of the 20 th century, and now at the beginning of the 21 st century, Hollywood and the news media have bombarded us with images and propaganda to promote all manner of previously unacceptable conduct, including interracial marriages. Nowhere has this been more intense than in South Africa over the last two decades. It often seems like two out of every three advertisements have a black male and a white female. Numerous New World Order Advocates openly say that mixed marriages are necessary to eradicate the whites in future generations.”

“The duties of patriotism are not prominently urged in sacred Scripture. This we account for, not by supposing, with a certain sickly school of moralists, that this sentiment is selfish, narrow or inconsistent with the broadest philanthropy; but by the facts, that the obligations of the citizen are not directly religious, and that they are so natural as to require little inculcation. The Hebrew Scriptures do indeed say enough, as in the text, to justify an intense love of native land and its institutions. Civil government is God’s ordinance, and if it be just, one of his greatest temporal blessings. The diversity of tongues, characters, races and interests among mankind forbids their union in one universal commonwealth. The aggregation of men into separate nations is therefore necessary; and the authority of the governments instituted over them, to maintain internal order and external defence against aggression, is of divine appointment. Hence, to sustain our government with heart and hand is not only made by God our privilege, but our duty. Our best way to advance the well-being of the [human] race is to advance that of the portion of our [human] race associated with us in the same society. He who extends his philanthropy so broadly as to refuse a special attachment to the interests of his own people, will probably make it so thin as to be of no account to any people.I therefore believe that there is nothing opposed to an enlightened Christianity in a warm patriotism for our particular country. This feeling is made up of several elements: a legitimate regard for our own welfare and worldly estate, interest in that of our families, and a wider benevolence towards our fellow citizens; together with an honest pride in the glories of our history, and in the justice of our institutions, with the attachments of local affection to the very scenery and soil of our native land.”R. L. Dabney
Sermon -The Christian Soldier (1862)

Causes of Separation in 1973 (PCA separates from PCUS)
John Edwards Richards

The Socialist, who declares all men are equal. Therefore there must be a great leveling of humanity and oneness of privilege and possession.

The Racial Amalgamationist, who preaches that the various races should be merged into one race and differences erased in oneness.

The Communist, who would have one mass of humanity coerced into oneness by a totalitarian state and guided exclusively by Marxist philosophy.

The Internationalist, who insists on co-existence between all peoples and nations that they be as one regardless of ideology or history.John Edwards Richards
One of the founders of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

“No human can measure the anguish of personality that goes on within the children of miscegenation… Let those who would erase the racial diversity of God’s creation beware lest the consequence of their evil be visited upon their children.”
John Edwards Richards
One of the founders of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)

“The vast majority of good thinking people prefer to associate with, and intermarry with, people of their respective race; this is part of the God-given inclination to honor and uphold the distinctiveness of separate races. But there are many false prophets of oneness, and many shallow stooges, who seek to force the amalgamation of the races.” ~

Dr. John E. Richards

The Racial Problem Facing America (1964)

If from this we may conclude that ethnic pluriformity is the revealed will of God for the human race in its present situation, it is highly questionable whether the Christian can have part in any program that would seek to erase all ethnic distinctions. That such distinctions may be crossed over by individuals may be granted, but it is at least questionable whether a program designed to wipe out such differences on a mass scale should be endorsed by the Christian. It is this line of argument that the average Christian segregationist uses to back his view. He fears that the real goal of the integrationist is the intermarriage of the races, and therefore the breakdown of the distinctions between them. Many who would be willing to integrate at various lesser levels refuse to do so, simply because they feel that such will inevitably lead to intermarriage of the races, which they consider to be morally wrong. . . .

The mass mixing of the races with the intent to erase racial boundaries he does consider to be wrong, and on the basis of this, he would oppose the mixing of the two races in this way. Let it be acknowledged that a sin in this area against the Negro race has been perpetrated by godless white men, both past and present, but this does not justify the adoption of a policy of mass mixing of the races. Rather, the Bible seems to teach that God has established and thus revealed his will for the human race now to be that of ethnic pluriformity, and thus any scheme of mass integration leading to mass mixing of the races is decidedly unscriptural.

I don’t believe [racial integration] is what the Bible teaches. Even though we may have transgressed the boundaries of nationhood and of peoplehood, it seems to me that God did create man of one blood in order that he may dwell as different nations throughout the world. But after the fall, when sinful man cosmopolitanly – meaning by that, with a desire to obliterate separate nationhood, with a desire to build a sort of United Nations organization under the Tower of Babel…attempted to resist developing peoplehood…[God confused the tongues of men]…because men had said, ‘Let us build a city and a tower which will stretch up to heaven lest we be scattered’… Pentecost sanctified the legitimacy of separate nationality rather than saying this is something we should outgrow… In fact, even in the new earth to come, after the Second Coming of Christ, we are told that the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of the heavenly Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth shall bring the glory and the honor—the cultural treasures—of the nations into it… But nowhere in Scripture are any indications to be found that such peoples should ever be amalgamated into one huge nation.

“In another fourteen years, the future looks bleak for White Christians everywhere. In 1900, Europe possessed two-thirds of the world’s Christians. By 2025, that number will fall below 20% — with most Christians living in the Third World of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Then, nearly 75% of the world’s Catholics will be Non-Western Mestizos or Black Africans. Right now, Nigeria has the world’s largest Catholic Theological School. India has more Christians than most Western nations. And Jesus is more and more being portrayed with a dark skin. By 2050, more than 80% of Catholics in the U.S. will be of Non-Western origins. Only a fraction of Anglicans will be English. Lutherans, Presbyterians and other mainstream denominations will find their chief centres of growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America — often syncretistically absorbing large quantities of Pre-Christian Paganism as revived Voo-dooism and increasing ancestor-worship. This “Christianity” rapidly degenerates into an immigrationistic, prolific and socialistic jungle-religion.”

Dr. F.N. Lee circa 2011
Christian-Afrikaners pg. 87

“One of the very reasons that Paul desired that the Gentiles become Christians was not only so that the Gentiles themselves may be blessed but also so that the Gentiles, then as Christians, may proceed to provoke his own Israelitic nation to jealousy and thereafter to faith in Christ. Accordingly, I think we must judge that every Christian who does not love his own nation is either an ungrateful cosmopolitan rascal and a rebuilder of the tower of Babel or otherwise is woefully ignorant of Scripture. And, I am sorry to say that the world is full of these kind of people today.”

Dr. Francis Nigel Lee
Sermon

“An important question now arises. As men would have spread over the Earth and inhabited different lands — would national and racial differences have developed in any case?

In our opinion, racial and national differences would have developed among men in any case — even if the fall had not happened. For race and nationality are not the result of sin. Not only is this the opinion of certain leading theologians — but importantly, Holy Scripture itself seems to imply that this would have been the case. Even though for obvious reasons there are no explicit pronouncements, the whole trend of the teaching of the Bible presupposes the necessity of man’s development into nations and races — irrespective of the advent of sin.

For firstly, the Triune God of variety in unity, is a God who makes distinctions and divisions. We have seen how he divided the heavens from the earth; the light from the darkness; the waters above the firmament from those below; the seas from the dry land; the grass from the herbs and the fruit trees; the day from the night; the living creatures of the water from those of the air and from one another after their kinds; the various living creatures of the earth from one another after their kinds; Adam from the animals; and Eve from Adam. Now it is submitted that even without sin, God would have continued to divide His creatures. He would have divided Cain and Abel and Seth from Adam and Eve; Cain from Abel and from Seth; and their descendants from them — until nations and races too would ultimately have come into existence, even as they actually did in practice – “when the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam.”

Secondly, it is submitted that at least racial differences, if not separate nationalities with their own languages too, would have come into existence in any case, even without sin. It may perhaps be argued that the different languages which only developed after the destruction of the tower of Babel may not have developed gradually in the state of rectitude. But as racial factors or hereditarily transmissible physical characteristics (unlike language distinctions) are genetically predetermined and nowhere in the Bible attributed to the advent of sin or its consequences at the tower of Babel — we would maintain that all the necessary chromosomes required for the later development of the various racial strains now extant were already present in the perfect seed within the body of the unfallen Adam, even though his body and his chromosomes too must also have been adversely affected later as the result of his sin.

Thirdly, perhaps also as a further development of the tower of Babel, the words of Paul in his address on Mars’ Hill to the Athenians — words going back to creation, and going forward into the future too — seem to support the above view. There he declared that the Triune God of variety in unity “made all nations of men, for to dwell on the whole surface of the Earth – and has determined the times before appointed and the boundaries of their habitation.” Paul distinctly declares here that God made all the nations “to dwell on all the surface of the Earth”. God made them for the purpose that they might leave one another, spread out, and be separated by the boundaries of their habitation — made them in order that they should become nations. And God pre-ordained, “before appointed,” that each of these nations would have its own time of activity and place of operations in God’s world program for which God “made…all nations” – made them in creation, quite apart from their later fall into sin.

Finally, we are informed that even after God has totally banished sin and all its consequences at the end of the age, even in the city of the New Jerusalem on the renewed Earth — “the nations of them which are saved walk in the light of it and the kings of the Earth…shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.” Then, “they shall be His peoples” (laoi), plural not singular (laos). For then, they all return to Genesis 1:1’s eternally-Triune Elohiym (and not to a unitarian multiracialist Allah).

Now it is strange indeed that God would allow saved nations as such in the New Jerusalem, and still stranger that He would call their produce “the glory and honour of the nations” – if nations as such are purely the result of sin, in that they would not otherwise have come into existence.

Francis Nigel Lee

““In the presence of this apparent collapse of free democracy, any descendant of the liberty-loving races of mankind may well stand dismayed; and to those liberty-loving races no doubt most of my hearers tonight belong. I am of the Anglo-Saxon race; many of you belong to a race whose part in the history of human freedom is if anything still more glorious; and as we all contemplate the struggle of our fathers in the winning of that freedom which their descendants seem now to be so willing to give up, we are impressed anew with the fact that it is far easier to destroy than to create.”

J.Gresham Machen (1881-1937)

“[Gal 3:28] does not mean that all are on a level in regard to talents, comforts, or wealth; but it means only that all people are on a level “in regard to religion.” This is the sole point under discussion; and the interpretation should be limited to this. It is not a fact that people are on a level in all things, nor is it a fact that the gospel designs to break down all the distinctions of society.”

“The words “his own,” refer to those who are naturally dependent on him, whether living in his own immediate family or not. There may be many distant relatives naturally dependent on our aid, besides those who live in our own house.

And specially for those of his own house – Margin, “kindred.” The word “house,” or “household,” better expresses the sense than the word “kindred.” The meaning is, those who live in his own family. They would naturally have higher claims on him than those who did not. They would commonly be his nearer relatives, and the fact, from whatever cause, that they constituted his own family, would lay the foundation for a strong claim upon him. He who neglected his own immediate family would be more guilty than he who neglected a more remote relative.

He hath denied the faith – By his conduct, perhaps, not openly. He may be still a professor of religion and do this; but he will show that he is imbued with none of the spirit of religion, and is a stranger to its real nature. The meaning is, that he would, by such an act, have practically renounced Christianity, since it enjoins this duty on all.”

~Albert Barnes Commentary on 1 Tim.5:8

“By his own he means all of a man’s relations, his family or his stock.” (‘Stock’ being the preferred synonym for “race” in Poole’s day.)

~Matthew Poole Commentary on 1 Tim.5:8

“Faith does not set aside natural duties, but perfects and strengthens them.”

~Johann Albrecht Bengel’s Gnomen on 1 Tim.5:8

More standard Christianity pre-Cultural Marxism

Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers

Acts 17:26

Hath determined the times before appointed.—The better MSS. give simply, “the appointed seasons.” Few words, even in St. Paul’s teaching, are more pregnant with significance. They justify all that the wise of heart have said as to the “manifold wisdom of God,” as seen in history and in the education of mankind. The special gifts of character of each race—Hebrew thought of God, Greek sense of beauty, Roman sense of law, Teutonic truthfulness, Keltic impulsiveness, docility—have all their work to do. All local circumstances of soil and climate that influence character come under the head of the “bounds of men’s habitation.” All conditions of time—the period at which each race has been called to play its part in the drama of the world’s history—come under the head of the “appointed seasons.”

Ellicott lived 1819 – 1905

Just got done reading through a section of 10th century Emperor Constantine VII’s book De Administrando Imperio and according to him, there were three cardinal sins a Byzantine Emperor could commit in regards to foreign peoples.

1) Misappropriation of the Patriarch’s vestments and jewels, such as giving them away as war cessations or using them to impress foreigners.

2) Giving away the secret of Greek Fire or allowing it to be manufactured in any city which was not Christian.

3) Marrying or having your son or daughter marry a foreigner, particularly the northern pagans or eastern Muslims.

For each point, Constantine VII talks about an Emperor who violated these laws and how they came to a bad end with soiled legacies. What’s really interesting is that he explicitly connects #3 with #1. Constantine VII claims that Leo IV married a Khazar, while secular sources say that his father married a Khazar and so Leo IV was half Khazar. Either way, the Khazar influence led Leo IV to seize one of the Patriarch’s jewels from the Hagia Sophia without permission and set it upon his forehead as crown at which point he was struck down with an illness which eventually killed him. Constantine VII makes the application clear; foreign mixture leads to religious sin. Note that in either case the Khazar princess was said to have been baptized, but this changed nothing. Constantine VII considered this “a sufficient warning to restrain anyone who is minded to emulate his evil deeds.”

This is the same section of his book where Constantine VII says,

“For each nation has different customs and divergent laws and institutions, and should consolidate those things that are proper to it, and should form and develop out of the same nation the associations for the fusion of its life. For just as each animal mates with its own tribe, so it is right that each nation should marry and cohabit not with those of other race and tongue but of the same tribe and speech. For hence arise naturally harmony of thought and intercourse among one another and friendly converse and living together; but alien customs and divergent laws are likely on the contrary to engender enmities and quarrels and hatreds and broils, which tend to beget not friendship and association but spite and division.”

-Constantine VII

“He tells them the charge his master had given him, to fetch a wife for his son from among his kindred, with the reason of it, v.37,38. The highest degrees of divine affection must not divest us of natural affection.”

~Matthew Henry
Commentary on Gen.24:29-53

“Numbers 2:2 — Those of a tribe were to pitch together, every man by his own standard.

Note, It is the will of God that mutual love and affection, converse and communion, should be kept up among relations. Those that are of kin to each other should, as much as they can, be acquainted with each other; and the bonds of nature should be improved for the strengthening of the bonds of Christian communion. 3. Every one must know his place and keep in it; they were not allowed to fix where they pleased, nor to remove when they pleased, but God quarters them, with a charge to abide in their quarters. Note, It is God that appoints us the bounds of our habitation, and to him we must refer ourselves. He shall choose our inheritance for us (Ps. xlvii. 4), and in his choice we must acquiesce, and not love to flit, nor be as the bird that wanders from her nest. 4. Every tribe had its standard, flag, or ensign, and it should seem every family had some particular ensign of their father’s house, which was carried as with us the colours of each troop or company in a regiment are. These were of use for the distinction of tribes and families, and the gathering and keeping of them together, in allusion to which the preaching of the gospel is said to lift up an ensign, to which the Gentiles shall seek, and by which they shall pitch, Isa. xi. 10, 12. Note, God is the God of order, and not of confusion.

Matthew Henry Commentary
Numbers Chapter 2:1-2

2. Every tribe had a captain, a prince, or commander-in-chief, whom God himself nominated, the same that had been appointed to number them, ch. i. 5. Our being all the children of one Adam is so far from justifying the levellers, and taking away the distinction of place and honour, that even among the children of the same Abraham, the same Jacob, the same Judah, God himself appointed that one should be captain of all the rest. There are powers ordained of God, and those to whom honour and fear are due and must be paid.”

Matthew Henry
Numbers 2:3-34

The (Abolitionist Egalitarian) argument, fully and legitimately carried out, would condemn every arrangement of society, which did not secure to all its members an absolute equality of position; it is the very spirit of socialism and communism.

“The parties in this conflict are not merely Aboli­tionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake….”

Commenting on these Quotes and on Thornwell in general, Historian Eugene Genovesie wrote,

“Moving from Church to state—significantly, in a sermon on “The Christian Doctrine of Slavery”—he denounced the political radical­ism of the age and upheld “representative, republican government against the despotism of the masses on the one hand, and the su­premacy of a single will on the other.” In this sermon, as in others, Thornwell assailed the Abolitionists for waging wars not merely on slavery as a peculiar form of property, not merely on Southern rights as the bastion of the Constitution, but on the very principle of social order. Implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the Abolitionists were attack­ing all class distinctions and legitimate authority. Indeed, they were attacking Christianity itself since the Bible commanded social stratifi­cation and subordination in the wake of the Fall. Thornwell charged that the Abolitionist argument “fully and legitimately carried out, would condemn every arrangement of society, which did not secure to its members an absolute equality of position; it is the very spirit of socialism and communism.” And in one of his fiercest polemical out­bursts, he added, “The parties in this conflict are not merely Aboli­tionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.”

“Some forms of homosexuality today are of a similar nature, in that they are not just homosexuality but a philosophic expression. One must have understanding for the real homophile’s problem. But much modern homosexuality is an expression of the current denial of antithesis. It has led in this case to an obliteration of the distinction between man and woman. So the male and the female as complementary partners are finished. This is a form of homosexuality which is a part of the movement below the line of despair. In much of modern thinking all antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against — including the male-female distinctions. The pressure toward unisex is largely rooted here”

Francis Schaeffer,
The God Who is There (1968).

[The] differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now. . . . [T]hese varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those cause as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose. . . . God fashions the different races of men in their peculiarities to suit them to the regions which they inhabit.”

-Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Chapter 1, Section 3 (1872–73)

“The Church Catholic is one in Christ, but it is not necessarily one visible, all-absorbing organization upon the earth. There is no schism where there is no breach of charity. Churches may be perfectly at one in every principle of faith and order, and yet geographically distinct, and mutually independent. As the unity of the human race is not disturbed by its division into countries and nations, so the unity of the spiritual seed of Christ is neither broken nor impaired by separation and division into various Church constitutions. Accordingly, in the Protestant countries, Church organizations have followed national lines.”

-Rev. Thornwell, address to the PCCSA GA 1861

“We now reply to the question, Can we know the sense of the prophetic law of Noah with absolute certainty ? We answer most unequivocally, Yes. How, then, is it to be known ? By the perfect conformity of the fulfilment of the law to its legitimate interpretation. Has such fulfilment occurred? Most unquestionably. “Where is it seen ? In all quarters of the globe since the flood, but most sublimely in America. It is obvious in a universal and permanent trinity of races ; in their political inequality of condition; in the Christianization of all the Japhetic nations, and of no others ; in the occupation of the Shemitic wilderness of America by Japheth ; and in the service of Plain to Japheth in the Southern States, in the islands, and in South America … “

“I should very much like to know where in the whole of the New Testament the author finds this violent, unnatural, and immoral proposition. Christ did not have the same kind of regard for one person as for another. We are specifically told that there were certain persons whom He especially loved. It is most improbable that He thought of other nations as He thought of His own. The sight of His national city moved Him to tears, and the highest compliment he paid was, ‘Behold an Israelite indeed.’ The author has simply confused two entirely different things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering nonsense. If we love a man at all, the impression he produces on us must be vitally different to the impression produced by another man whom we love. To speak of having the same kind of regard for both is about as sensible as asking a man whether he prefers chrysanthemums or billiards. Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede. And the reason Tolstoians can even endure to think of an equally distributed affection is that their love of humanity is a logical love, a love into which they are coerced by their own theories, a love which would be an insult to a tom-cat.”

G.K.Chesterton, Varied Types

“I am not quite satisfied with the casuistry by which the productions of one person are thus passed upon the world for the productions of another. I allow that not only knowledge, but powers and qualities of mind may be communicated; but the actual effect of individual exertion never can be transferred, with truth, to any other than its own original cause. One person’s child may be made the child of another person by adoption, as among the Romans, or by the ancient Jewish mode of a wife having children borne to her upon her knees, by her handmaid. But these were children in a different sense from that of nature. It was clearly understood that they were not of the blood of their nominal parents. So in literary children, an authour may give the profits and fame of his composition to another man, but cannot make that other the real authour. A Highland gentleman, a younger branch of a family, once consulted me if he could not validly purchase the Chieftainship of his family, from the Chief who was willing to sell it. I told him it was impossible for him to acquire, by purchase, a right to be a different person from what he really was; for that the right of Chieftainship attached to the blood of primo-geniture, and, therefore, was incapable of being transferred. I added, that though Esau sold his birth-right, or the advantages belonging to it, he still remained the first-born of his parents; and that whatever agreement a Chief might make with any of the clan, the Herald’s Office could not admit of the metamorphosis, or with any decency attest that the younger was the elder; but I did not convince the worthy gentleman.”

“All are not created on equal terms … This God has testified, not only in the case of single individuals; He has also given a specimen of it in the whole posterity of Abraham, to make it plain that the future condition of each nation was entirely at His disposal.”

(Calvin, Institutes …,bk.iii, pp.206-205 Beveridge translation)

“… one thing is perfectly plain—whether or not liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity. And that being the case, it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization. A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour… The modern liberal doctrine is that all men everywhere, no matter what their race or creed, are brothers.”

(J.Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.133)

“And thus my final lecture is rapidly drawing to its end. But before I close, I feel nevertheless that one question continues to press for an answer, which accordingly I shall not refuse to face, the question namely, at what I am aiming in the end: at the abandonment of the doctrine of election … Our generation turns a deaf ear to Election [God’s order], but grows madly enthusiastic over Selection [encompassing everything from evolution to democracy, liberalism, imagination, and license] … The problem concerns the fundamental question: Whence are the differences? Why is not all alike? Whence is it that one thing exists in one state, another in another? There is no life without differentiation without inequality. The perception of difference, the very source of our human consciousness, the causative principles of all that exists, and grows and develops, in short, the mainspring of all life and thought … Whence are those differences? Whence is the dissimilarity , the heterogeneity of existence, of genesis, and consciousness? To put it concretely, if you were a plant, would you rather be a rose than a mushroom; if insect, butterfly rather than spider; if bird, eagle rather than owl; if a higher vertebrate, a lion rather than a hyena; and again, being a man, richer than poorer, talented rather than dull-minded, of Aryan race rather than Hottentot or Kaffir? Between all these there is differentiation, wide differentiation. Everywhere then differences, differences between one thing and the other; and that too, such differences involve in almost every instance, preference … This is the one supreme question in the vegetable and animal kingdom, among men, in all social life and it is by means of the theory of Selection that our present age attempts to solve this problem of problems …

Now the blade of grass is not conscious of this, and the spider goes on entrapping the fly, the tiger killing the stag, and in those cases the weaker being does not account to itself for its misery. But we men are clearly consious of these differences, and by us therefore the question cannot be evaded, whether the theory of Selection be a solution calculated to reconcile the weaker, the less richly endowed creature, with its existence. It will be acknowledged that in itself this theory can but incite to a more furious struggle, with a lasciate ogni speranza, voi che’ntrate for the weaker being. Against the ordinance of faith that the weaker shall succumb to the stronger, according to the system of election, no struggle can avail …

For this is precisely the high significance of the doctrine of Election that, in this dogma, as long as three centuries ago, Calvinism dared to face this same all-dominating problem, solving it, however, not in the sense of a blind selection stirring in unconscious cells, but honoring the sovereign choice of Him Who created all things visible and invisible. The determination of our own persons, whether one is to be born as girl or boy, rich or poor, dull or clever, white or colored, or even as Abel or Cain, is the most tremendous predestination conceivable in heaven or on earth; and still we see it taking place before our eyes every day, and we ourselves are subject to it in our entire personality; our existence, our very nature, our position in life being entirely dependent on it. This all embracing predestination … all-dominating election. Election in creation, election in providence, and so election also to eternal life; election in the realm of grace as well as in the realm of nature … all Christians hold election as we do, in honor, both in creation and in providence; and that Calvinism deviates from the other Christian confessions in this respect only, that, seeking unity and placing the glory God above all things, it dares to extend the mystery of Election to spiritual life, and to the hope for all life to come?”

(A.Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, pp.117-119)

“It cannot be denied that there is a great difference in men in this respect. Some are morose, irritable, and unsocial in their dispositions, others are directly the reverse … They may be born with these distinctive traits of character, and such traits beyond doubt are in numerous cases innate and often hereditary … It is admitted that nations as well as tribes and families, have their distinctive characteristics, and that these characteristics are not only physical and mental, but also social and moral. Some tribes are treacherous and cruel. Some are mild and confiding. Some are addicted to gain, others to war. Some are sensual, some intellectual. We instinctively judge of each according to its character; we like or dislike, approve or disapprove, without asking ourselves any questions as to the origin of these distinguishing characteristics. And if we do raise that question, although we are forced to answer it by admitting that these dispositions are innate and hereditary, and that they are not self-acquired by the individual whose character they constitute, we nevertheless, and none the less, approve or condemn them according to their nature. This is instinctive and necessary, and therefore the correct, judgment of the mind …

The Irish people have always been remarkable for their fidelity; the English for honesty; the Germans for truthfulness. These national traits, as revealed in individuals, are not the effect of self-discipline. They are innate, hereditary dispositions, as obviously as the physical, mental, or emotional peculiarities by which one people is distinguished from another. And yet by the common judgment of men this fact in no degree detracts from the moral character of these dispositions.”

(Charles Hodge, Syst.Theo.Vol.2, pp.112-113)

” [The] differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now. . . . [T]hese varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those cause as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose. . . . God fashions the different races of men in their peculiarities to suit them to the regions which they inhabit.”

Paul had two classes of brethren; those who were with him the children of God in Christ; these he calls brethren in the Lord, Philip, i. 14, holy brethren, &c. The others were those who belonged to the family of Abraham. These he calls brethren after the flesh, that is, in virtue of natural descent from the same parent. Philemon he addresses as his brother, both in the flesh and in the Lord. The Bible recognizes the validity and rightness of all the constitutional principles and impulses of our nature. It therefore approves of parental and filial affection, and, as is plain from this and other passages, of peculiar love for the people of our own race and country.

Charles Hodge
Commentary Romans 9

“Whether the slaves of this country may be safely admitted to the enjoyments of personal liberty, is a matter of dispute; but that they count not, consistently with the public welfare, be entrusted with the exercise of political power, is on all hands admitted.”

Charles Hodge, “Slavery”, p. 297

“If the fact that the master and slave belong to different races, precludes the possibility of their living together on equal terms, the inference is, not that the one has a right to oppress the other, but that they should separate. Whether this should be done by dividing the land between them and giving rise to distinct communities, or by the removal of the inferior class on just and wise conditions, it is not for us to say. We have undertaken only to express an opinion as to the manner in which the bible directs those, who look to it for guidance, to treat this difficult subject, and not to trace out a plan to provide for ulterior results. It is for this reason, we have said nothing of African colonization, though we regard it as one of the noblest enterprises of modern benevolence.”~~Charles Hodge, “Slavery”, p. 305

“Under the old dispensation it (slavery) was expressly permitted by divine command, and under the New Testament is nowhere forbidden.”~~Charles Hodge, “Slavery”, p. 298

“This is a law of our being….Members of the same nation have a feeling for each other which they have not for foreigners. Member of the same tribe or class in a community are bound together by a still closer tie.”

Charles Hodge
“The Unity of the Church”, p. 24

“It cannot be denied that there is a great difference in men in this respect. Some are morose, irritable, and unsocial in their dispositions, others are directly the reverse … They may be born with these distinctive traits of character, and such traits beyond doubt are in numerous cases innate and often hereditary … It is admitted that nations as well as tribes and families, have their distinctive characteristics, and that these characteristics are not only physical and mental, but also social and moral. Some tribes are treacherous and cruel. Some are mild and confiding. Some are addicted to gain, others to war. Some are sensual, some intellectual. We instinctively judge of each according to its character; we like or dislike, approve or disapprove, without asking ourselves any questions as to the origin of these distinguishing characteristics. And if we do raise that question, although we are forced to answer it by admitting that these dispositions are innate and hereditary, and that they are not self-acquired by the individual whose character they constitute, we nevertheless, and none the less, approve or condemn them according to their nature. This is instinctive and necessary, and therefore the correct, judgment of the mind …

The Irish people have always been remarkable for their fidelity; the English for honesty; the Germans for truthfulness. These national traits, as revealed in individuals, are not the effect of self-discipline. They are innate, hereditary dispositions, as obviously as the physical, mental, or emotional peculiarities by which one people is distinguished from another. And yet by the common judgment of men this fact in no degree detracts from the moral character of these dispositions.”

[The] differences between the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro races, which is known to have been as distinctly marked two or three thousand years before Christ as it is now. . . . [T]hese varieties of race are not the effect of the blind operation of physical causes, but by those cause as intelligently guided by God for the accomplishment of some wise purpose. . . . God fashions the different races of men in their peculiarities to suit them to the regions which they inhabit.”

“[Some] shall be born, live, and die, … male or female, white or black, wise or foolish. God is no less sovereign in the distribution of His favors … Some He gives riches, to others honor,… Others are born to dishonor … and live lives of wretchedness. Some are placed in Christian lands where they receive all the benefits of the gospel; others live and die in the darkness of heathenism. Some are brought through faith unto salvation; others are left to perish in unbelief. And to a very large extent these external things, which are not the result of individual choice, decide the person’s life course and eternal destiny.”

(Boettner,The Ref. Doct. of Predestination, p.36)

“Though not the continent of origins, Europe is emphatically the continent of development. The Indo-European race — the people of progress — find their fullest expansion and activity, not in their original seat in Iran, but in Europe, whence they are spreading over all the quarters of the globe … Transplanted to Europe, [Christianity] gradually attained its full development, and became the foundation on which is reared the vast and noble edifice which is modern civilization …

Evidently, this continent [North America] was not designed to give birth and development to a new civilization; but to receive one ready-made, and to furnish the cultivated race of the Old World the scene most worthy of their activity. Its vast plains, overflowing with natural wealth, are turned towards Europe, and its largest rivers discharge into the Atlantic; while its lofty mountains , and less fertile lands, are removed far towards its western shores. Thus it seems to invite the Indo-European race, the people of progress, to new fields of action; to encourage their expansion throughout its entire territory, and their fusion into one nation.”

(Arnold Guyot, Physical Geography, 1873, as reproduced in Hall’s The Christian History of the Constitution, pp.3-4)

“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”

John Stuart Mill

“Heaven hath provided this country, not indeed derelict, but only partially settled, and consequently open for reception of a new enlargement of Japheth. Europe was settled by Japheth; America is settling from Europe: and perhaps this second enlargement bids fair to surpass the first; for we are to consider all the European settlements of America collectively as springing from and transfused with the blood of Japheth … ”

(J.Wingate Thornton, The Pulpit of the American Revolution, as cited in Hall’s The Christian History of the American Constitution, p.382)

“We now reply to the question, Can we know the sense of the prophetic law of Noah [Gen. 9:24-27; 10:1-32] with absolute certainty ? We answer most unequivocally, Yes. How, then, is it to be known? By the perfect conformity of the fulfillment of the law to its legitimate interpretation. Has such fulfillment occurred? Most unquestionably. “Where is it seen? In all quarters of the globe since the flood, but most sublimely in America. It is obvious in a universal and permanent trinity of races; in their political inequality of condition; in the Christianization of all the Japhetic nations, and of no others; in the occupation of the Shemitic wilderness of America by Japheth; and in the service of Plain to Japheth in the Southern States, in the islands, and in South America … (p.18) A perfect coincidence of events with any legitimate interpretation of prophecy is infallibly a fulfillment; and such fulfillment inevitably coincides with the Divine meaning of the text — God being his own interpreter. Fulfillment is to prophetic law what usage is to statute law. Usage specifies the meaning of statutes by a uniform manner of applying them; and fulfillment is but the usage of the Almighty.”

“Their theology was preset for racism, because it was under-girded by a strict biblical literalism that could easily be made to support White supremacy. The Puritans were heirs of the Calvinist tradition. A hundred years earlier John Calvin had developed Reformed theology (also called Calvinist theology) in Geneva, Switzerland. His theology was rooted in a literal interpretation of the bible, especially the Hebrew scriptures. Let us be clear here … his theology — especially developed by his successors — supported at least two historic teachings that could easily accommodate such claims. These two pillars were the doctrines of sin and predestination. Calvin (following Paul and Augustine) taught that sin is hereditary and taht every human being born after Adam and Eve is an absolutely depraved sinner who lacks the capacity of altering that state. Salvation to Calvin, then, was completely the work of an all-sovereign God … Concerning how evil afflicts some people more than others Calvin concluded, that this is God’s sovereign will. Calvin’s followers moved predestination (or divine election, as it also is called) to a chief organizing position. Therefore God predetermined who would be redeemed to eternal life and who would be condemned to eternal damnation.

Puritan theology was heir to these understandings of sin and predestination; it also espoused distinctive views of covenant and creation. Regarding the doctrine of covenant, the Puritans’ biblical literalism led them to argue for a federal or full covenant, modeled after the Mosaic covenant, by which they insisted that God had predestined them to be the new chosen people …

Regarding the doctrine of creation, their central thesis was that God had not created humanity equal. Human beings had been created hierarchically. This meant that there were levels of humanity ranging from the highest to the lowest. ‘God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence’, they delighted in proclaiming, ‘hath so disposed of the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in subjection.’ … Each of these theological ideas … divinely imputed superiority not only in religious status but also with respect to racial, gender, social, economic, and political status. This is precisely what happened.”

(Paul R. Griffin, SEEDS OF RACISM, pp.16-17)

“Apartheid was born out of the Reformed tradition; it is, in a very real sense, the brainchild of the Dutch Reformed churches. It is Reformed Christians who have split the church on the basis of race and color, and who now claim that racially divided churches are a true understanding of the nature of the Christian church.”

(Alllan Boesak, Black & Reformed, pp.85-86) This “Volkstheologie” Boesak has described patently as “… the negative aspects of Kuyperianism.” (ibid.p.87)

As Boettner says, “second causes [such as heredity] are fully recognized, — not as independent of God, but as having their proper place in His plan … as regards God’s providence we are to understand that He is intimately concerned with every detail in the affairs of men and in the course of nature.”

(L. Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination,p.35)

“[S]till we both feel that the life in Old Europe is not something separate from life here; it is one and the same current of human existence that flows through both Continents. By virtue of our common origin, you may call us bone of your bone, — we feel that you are flesh of our flesh, and although you are outstripping us in the most discouraging way, you will never forget that the historic cradle of your wondrous youth stood in our old Europe, and was most gently rocked in the cradle of my once great Fatherland.”

(A.Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, p.7)

“The Javanese are a different race than us; they live in a different region; they stand on a wholly different level of development; they are created differently in their inner life; they have a wholly different past behind them; and they have grown up in wholly different ideas. To expect of them that they should find the fitting expression of their faith in our Confession and in our Catechism is therefore absurd.

Now this is not something special for the Javanese, but stems from a general rule. The men are not all alike among whom the Church occurs. They differ according to origin, race, country, region, history, construction, mood and soul, and they do not always remain the same, but undergo various stages of development. Now the Gospel will not objectively remain outside their reach, but subjectively be appropriated by them, and the fruit thereof will come to confession and expression, the result may not be the same for all nations and times. The objective truth remains the same, but the matter in appropriation, application and confession must be different, as the color of the light varies according to the glass in which it is collected. He who has traveled and came into contact with Christians in different parts of the world of distinct races, countries and traditions cannot be blind for the sober fact of this reality. It is evident to him. He observes it everywhere.”……

Abraham Kuyper:
Common Grace (1902–1905)

“As a church, we have always worked purposefully for the separation of the races. In this regard apartheid can rightfully be called a church policy.”

“Nationalism, within proper limits, has the divine sanction; an imperialism that would, in the interest of one people, obliterate all lines of distinction is everywhere condemned as contrary to the divine will. Later prophecy raises its voice against the attempt at world-power, and that not only, as is sometimes assumed, because it threatens Israel, but for the far more principal reason, that the whole idea is pagan and immoral.

Now it is through maintaining the national diversities, as these express themselves in the difference of language, and are in turn upheld by this difference, that God prevents realization of the attempted scheme… [In this] was a positive intent that concerned the natural life of humanity. Under the providence of God each race or nation has a positive purpose to serve, fulfillment of which depends on relative seclusion from others.”

-Geerhardus Vos,
Biblical Theology

Romans 11:17, 19, with its “branches broken off” metaphor has frequently been viewed as proof of the relativity and changeability of election, and it is pointed out that at the end of vs. 23, the Gentile Christians are threatened with being cut off in case they do not continue in the kindness of God. But wrongly. Already this image of engrafting should have restrained such an explanation. This image is nowhere and never used of the implanting of an individual Christian, into the mystical body of Christ by regeneration. Rather, it signifies the reception of a racial line or national line into the dispensation of the covenant or their exclusion from it. This reception of course occurs by faith in the preached word, and to that extent, with this engrafting of a race or a nation, there is also connected the implanting of individuals into the body of Christ. The cutting off, of course, occurs by unbelief; not, however, by the unbelief of person who first believed, but solely by the remaining in unbelief of those who, by virtue of their belonging to the racial line, should have believed and were reckoned as believers. So, a rejection ( = multiple rejections) of an elect race is possible, without it being connected to a reprobation of elect believers. Certainly, however, the rejection of a race or nation involves at the same time the personal reprobation of a sequence of people. Nearly all the Israelites who are born and die between the rejection of Israel as a nation and the reception of Israel at the end times appear to belong to those reprobated. And the thread of Romans 11:22 (of being broken off) is not directed to the Gentile Christians as individual believers but to them considered racially.”

Geerhardus Vos
Dogmatic Theology Vol. 1 — 118

“Just as all truth rests upon the truth that is from God, so the common foundation of all rights and duties lies in the sovereignty of God. When that sovereignty is denied or (what amounts to the same thing) banished to heaven because His kingdom is not of this world, what becomes then of the fountain of authority, of law, of every sacred and dutiful relation in state, society and family? What sanction remains for the distinctions of rank and station in life? What reason can there be that I obey another’s commands, that the one is needy, the other rich? All this is custom, routine, abuse, injustice, oppression. Eliminate God, and it can no longer be denied that all men are, in the revolutionary sense of the words, free and equal. State and society disintegrate, for there is a principle of dissolution at work that does not cease to operate until all further division is frustrated by that indivisible unit, that isolated human being, the individual—a term of the Revolution – naively expressive of its all-destructive character.”

– Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer
Mentor of Abraham Kuyper

“And they shall bring the glory of the nations into it, into the new Jerusalem.” Revelations 21:26

Doctor Schilder comments on this

“The universality of this covenant requires that not one race or people be left out. Yet during the old Testament times there was one nation singled out of the many as the chosen people, such separation was but an ad-interim. We may look upon the covenant as then on march toward fulfillment, towards times when all nations from the uttermost parts of the earth would belong to the covenant.

Klaas Schilder

“Scripture, as I read it, does not require societies, or even churches, to be integrated racially. Jews and Gentiles were brought together by God’s grace into one body. They were expected to love one another and to accept one another as brothers inthe faith. But the Jewish Christians continued to maintain a distinct culture, and house churches were not required to include members of both groups.”

John Frame,
“Racism, Sexism, Marxism”

“It may be agreed right off that for those that can see only this world, whether claiming to be Christian or not, the passion for unity in and of the world must become a veritable obsession. It may be admitted that an overriding unity of creation is as necessary to human existence as food and air. As long as that final unity is consciously or subconsciously seen in the One who made all that is, then the separations, diversities, distinctions and differences which abound in creation become not an unendurable frustration, but a boundless vista of goodness and peace. But if all talk of God is only a facade of pietism, and if the only thing that matters really is this world, and the Christian hope of the world to come is better described in the famous Marxist sneer as ‘pie in the sky;’ if all the direction and purpose of life is found in this world, and if all that matters is improvement and ultimately even perfection of this world, then unity, too, must be achieved in terms of this world. Hence, integration—a plan for another step in the unifying process of the diverse parts of society. Integration is not an end in itself, but a supposed step toward the end of achieving heaven on earth. Integrationists, therefore, like all Utopians everywhere in all times are wildly determined to remove from their path all who would obstruct their progress toward ultimate unity and heaven on earth.”

T. Robert Ingram

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Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling.
I am postmillennial in my eschatology.
Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity
Reformed in my Soteriology
Presuppositional in my apologetics
Kinist in my family theology
Agrarian in my regional community social order belief
Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief
Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic
Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern
Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview
One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics
Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place
Some of my favorite authors,
Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc.
My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture .
Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.
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MY orders are to fight; Then if I bleed, or fail, Or strongly win, what matters it? God only doth prevail. The servant craveth naught, Except to serve with might. I was not told to win or lose, – My orders are to fight. ~ Ethelwyn Wetherald

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